Pioneers Posters & Videos

Pioneers Posters & Videos Exhibit, New Computer Museum v. 1.5

The Computer Museum hosted a historic series entitled Computer Pioneers, and a series of posters were created as advertisements for that series. The actual physical posters were donated to the New Computer Museum by Brian Silverman, and they hang on the walls of the New Computer Museum and serve as links to the corresponding videos of the lectures on YouTube. There is also a page on The Computer Museum’s site that describes the lecture series and links to the videos. The Computer Museum: Videos

Overview

Here is a two part video on YouTube of a lecture by Gordon Bell that provides an overview of the history covered in the series.

Here is an extremely helpful image from Gordon Bell that shows the relationships among the earliest computers discussed in the series, and it is also hanging in the New Computer Museum. It originally appeared in the booklet authored by Gordon Bell entitled Computer Generations that was published by the Digital Equipment Corporation Museum Project in 1975.

NSF Computer Tree Graphic, Bell Additions (Click to see the picture and use built-in tools to magnify it.)

The first useful stored-program computer was EDSAC of Cambridge University, built by Maurice Wilkes’ group; Wilkes also invented the micro-programming concept, Wilkes was at the University of Pennsylvania where Eckart, Mauchly and von Neumann worked to conceive the stored program computer, which we now call the von Neumann computer. — Gordon Bell (Computer Generations, Digital Equipment Corporation Museum Project, 1975)

EDSAC

Maurice Wilkes The Birth and Growth of the Digital Computer September 23, 1979

Whirlwind

If we look at the ancestry of the minicomputer, it is clearly MIT’s Whirlwind. These machines and people had a profound effect on DEC. Ken Olsen, Dick Best, George Gerelds and several others of DEC are Whirlwind alumni, and I even wrote a program for it once. The PDP-1 was very much like Lincoln Lab’s TX-0 (one of the earliest transistorized machines), and TX-0 like Whirlwind. Beginning with Whirlwind, we can see four generations of minicomputers. It was operational in 1950 and was packaged in a two-story building. The second, our own PDP-1, was packaged in only four six-foot cabinets. The third generation PDP-8/I occupied about eight cubic feet and in the fourth generation, we have the single board-LSI-11, which is ½ X 8” x 10”, but it also has over ten times the calculating power of Whirlwind. Most important, the price has come down by a factor of nearly 200 in 15 years, which amounts to about 41% compounded per year; that is, every two years the price has halved. This permits new uses of the computer that are in the scale of the application. — Gordon Bell (Computer Generations, Digital Equipment Corporation Museum Project, 1975)

Jan Rajchman’s Memories

Jan Rajchman Memories: 1945-1950 March 7, 1985

This “Memories” poster from The Computer Museum hangs in the New Computer Museum.